Rashid Johnson : Plants, Presence, and Care

In the late 1960s, Hélio Oiticica’s installation Tropicália reinvented plants once more. His potted palms and dracaenas played a dual political role. On the one hand, they ironically purveyed a stereotypical vision of Brazil as a wild, green paradise. Their presence alluded to cultural politics and the reduction of complex ecosystems such as the Amazon forest into exploitable commodities. On the other hand, their material presence contaminated the purity of the white cube, letting the real world spill into the safe space of representation. And more recently, at the 2018 Venice Biennale, the installation Repair by Baracco+Wright Architects and Linda Tegg brought native Australian plants into the gallery space to deliver an urgent postcolonial message of ecological value. Germinating from the past, native plants stood in at once for Indigenous peoples and for the possibility of repairing the fraught relationship between architectural expansion, Western culturalization, and the ecologies of Southeast Victoria. Each of these botanical revolutions is indicative of how artists have deliberately reconfigured the roles that plants have played in art. No longer objectified vessels of anthropocentric symbolic meaning, in modern and contemporary art, plants have been charged with an unprecedented agency. This is certainly the case in Rashid Johnson’s maze-like installations in which plants coexist with objects as part of open-ended cultural and biographical constellations. Linda Tegg & Baracco+Wright ArchitectsGrasslands Repair, installation view, Pavillon australien, Biennale de Venise, 2018.Photo : Rory Gardiner, courtesy of Baracco+Wright Architects Linda Tegg & Baracco+Wright Architects (de haut en bas) Grasslands Repair & Skylight, installation views, Pavillon australien, Biennale de Venise, 2018. Photos : Rory Gardiner, courtesy of Baracco+Wright Architects Plants timidly infiltrated Johnson’s work in 2009 in the installation Smoke and Mirrors and quickly became the protagonists of a series of installations informed by Sol LeWitt’s 1980 photobook Autobiography. On each page of LeWitt’s book, a grid of nine square black-and-white images documents his studio on Hester Street, in Manhattan, where he lived and worked for twenty years. In his installations, including Plateaus (2014), Antoine’s Organ (2016), Within Our Gates (2017), and Monument (2018), Johnson reconfigures LeWitt’s preoccupations with architectural space, objects, nature, and identity in new and inventive ways by appropriating LeWitt’s modular grid (also central to his three-dimensional work) as a flattened, geometricized, and ordered emblem of modernity. The grid, a historical framework of knowledge, firmly anchors Johnson’s experience of space, body, and object in an unstable present — a critical milieu healthily skeptical of past conceptions of nature, architecture, and representation. Johnson’s notion of the biographical starts here, with the unavoidable desire to make sense of a present that can never be free of a complex past defined by multiple intersecting texts and unpredictable cross-cultural narratives.Books, rugs, monitors, chairs, fluorescent lights, and roughly sculpted busts made of shea butter are among the objects sharing the exhibition space with a myriad of potted plants — palms, bananas, ferns, spider plants, dracaenas. Perhaps not coincidentally, a page in LeWitt’s book is entirely dedicated to the plants in his studio. But Johnson’s plants also emerged from a different background. The association between plants and architectural structures piqued his interest while he was on a trip to the Turks and Caicos Islands, where he saw the empty, grid-like structures of derelict mid-construction buildings overrun by local vegetation. This visually striking combination led Johnson to think of a material and conceptual fluidity between categories. He thus began to refer to his installations as “brain-models” — places in which ideas form, are alive, morph, and are in constant flux. They are opportunities through which historical fictions can be constructed, broken down, and reconfigured.This fluidity unravels as one explores the installations. It soon appears clear that plants are not only present as living beings but also exist in the pages of the many books dotting the space, as well as in the shea butter sculptures and black soap shavings harboured across the grid. Shea butter is extracted from the nut of the African shea tree, and black soap is derived from the ash of locally harvested plants and barks such as plantain, cocoa pods, palm tree leaves, and shea tree bark. Like fat and felt in the work of Joseph Beuys, these materials have become mythical signifiers in Johnson’s narratives. Originally West African medicinal and healing plant-derived substances, both are now staples in beauty products worldwide. To Johnson, shea butter and black soap bridge his personal experience as a child growing up in the suburbs of Chicago to a desire to connect with an abstract and constructed idea of Africanness embodied in the natural origin of plants and their roots — an important reminder of the practical and metaphorical roles that plants play in identity construction. Rashid JohnsonWithin Our Gates, detail and installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscou, 2016. Photos : Alexey Naroditsky, courtesy of the artist & Hauser & Wirth, New York Rashid Johnson Smoke & Mirrors, installation view, The Sculpture Center, Long Island City, 2009. Photo : Jason Mandella, courtesy of the artist & Hauser & Wirth, New York Rashid JohnsonMonument, installation view, Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, 2018. Photo : David Hunter Hale, permission de | courtesy of the artist & Hauser & Wirth, New York Rashid Johnson Plateaus, installation view, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, 2014. Photo : Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of the artist, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles & Hauser & Wirth, New York Dried and processed plant matter, pressed in the form of book pages, also becomes the repository of cultural expressions — the crystallization and memorialization of social and personal narratives inviting visitors to become co-authors. It is in this non-hierarchical context that plants are cast as pervasive cultural makers and facilitators. Like Steichen’s delphiniums, they carry no religious or classical symbolism; they don’t speak through past rhetorical tropes. Like Oiticica’s potted varieties, Johnson’s plants occupy the gallery space with a political will to resist past, and very white, cultural tropes and institutional powers. They deliberately complicate object relations in art by offsetting the rectilinearity of the modular grid with the organic matter of leaves and stalks. Their living presence inserts the active possibility of growth in the work, alluding to cultivation (cultural as well as botanical) in the context of an otherwise crystallized and static set of cultural relationships. In this context, Johnson’s plants have become a creative engine, and as they do in Baracco+Wright and Tegg’s installation Repair, they uncunningly stand in for human communities. As Johnson states, “The plants are all from different places — cactus, palms, all these disparate plants from different places living together here. It’s almost a metaphor for the collective usAnne Strainchamps, “Race, Yearning And Escape In The Shelves Of Antoine’s Organ,” www.wpr.org/race-yearning-and-escape-shelves-antoines-organ. ." However, Johnson’s conception of plants is unique in the sense that he attributes to them a truly novel and highly plant-focused signification. He sees plants as living organisms in their own right — organisms that demand our attention. More than other outdoor shrubs or weeds, potted plants are dependent on our care and regular scrutiny. In this sense, plants constitute an invitation to be present, to live in the moment, to be observant, and to care. Botanists and good gardeners know that appropriately tending to plants requires being finely attuned to their unwritten, silent codes. Plant unhappiness manifests on the tips of leaves. To appropriately care for plants, therefore, means to develop an idiosyncratic vocabulary of phyto-signs — and, in truth, a slightly different vocabulary for each family of plants is sometimes needed. This aspect of Johnson’s plant philosophy is extremely important as it suspends the traditional reliance on the obvious nature/culture dichotomy, inviting us to think about plants in new ways. How can their specific qualities offer a model for us to think differently about the world? In Johnson’s view, plants invite us to be attentive to the most vulnerable in our communities. They remind us how important it is to see the signs of malaise and unhappiness, especially when those who are suffering do so in silence. Yet, despite the anthropomorphic subtext, Johnson’s plants remain wholly plants — they still branch off into an ecological dimension in which “to care” also means to care for a non-hierarchical and fluid relationship of naturecultures. As he points out, “There’s something interesting for me about the man-made object that houses the organic object and that kind of connectivity that they share. One kind of helping the other while the other tries to overcome the first. Plants will always burst through and take over. Nature has a way of claiming things that are foreign to it. We all have to think about how these things are going to survive.”Mara Veitch, “Artist Rashid Johnson Isn’t the Plant-Parenting Type” www.interviewmagazine.com/art/rashid-johnson-hauser-and-wirth-exhibition-the-hikers. ." Baracco+Wright Architects, Giovanni Aloi, Linda Tegg, Rashid Johnson

Rashid Johnson : Plants, Presence, and Care

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